etween 1984 and 1988 I was sponsored by VAG United Kingdom
to complete my training as a photographer. Part of this involved
working with the Audi Sport UK rally team, shooting the quattro and
Golf GTI rally cars as part of the British Open Rally Championship.
I was very fortunate to be in the right place at the right time, working
alongside VAG staff photographer David Bryant. David taught me a
lot about shooting cars, and while some of these images suffer from
the inexperience of youth (I apologise in advance for some woeful
focusing), I did my best to capture the spirit of a rally team.
This book relives some of Audi Sport UKâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s glory days, and many of the
images have never been published. I hope you enjoy them.
Best wishes
David Corfield

Hannu Mikkola on the Circuit of
Ireland rally in 1986. The event
was won by David Llewellin in the
MG Metro 6R4.

I

t all started with the noise. A raucous, violent sound
punctuated by pops and bangs. The deep rumble,
then a higher roar as a long straight allowed a
hastily snatched 5th gear before the hairpin bend
forced a violent application of brakes. And suddenly
there it was, right before me, smashing through
the forest like a lion after its dinner. All growls and
high-beam lights. The year was 1981, and being the
impressionable teenager I was back then, let me tell
you – Hannu Mikkola in his Audi quattro made quite
an impression…

I remember the smell of high-octane fuel, baking
brake discs and pine needles. The first rally
photograph I ever took was of Hannu and his Audi.
One frame was all I got, but that was enough. He
came through the Grizedale special stage on the
RAC Rally that year without a windscreen, having
rolled the car earlier in the day. He wore a set of
clear plastic goggles and drove the final stage that
night with nothing between him and the night air
save for 2mm of Perspex: Ari Vatanen may have
won the World Rally Championship that year in the

ancient Escort, but Hannu had welcomed in a new
dawn for World Rallying by winning the RAC, and I
for one was totally hooked.
Four years later and rallying’s Group B era had
transformed the sport. I would watch Grandstand
on BBC television every Saturday for glimpses of the
cars and their drivers. Never had motorsport gripped
me as much. My brother and I became keen rivals
– he a Lancia fan and me with Audi. We both wrote
off to the teams’ PR offices and soon posters of the
cars adorned our bedroom walls. Little did I realise

then how much that first letter to Audi UK would
affect me…
I received a box of images from David Bryant,
VAG’s staff photographer, as well as a video of Stig
Blomqvist’s 1983 season with Audi Sport UK. In the
box was a compliments slip wishing me well with
my photography. It was all the incentive I needed
to write straight back and send in some crudely
printed images of a local rally to show more of what
I could do! Poor David, I don’t think he realised how
keen I was to follow the sport in more detail, but

short-wheelbase Sport Quattro prepared by David
Sutton (replacing YMN44, crashed three months
earlier by Harald Demuth on the RAC Rally). He
was performing a series of doughnuts in the frozen
carpark testing out some studded tyres from
Michelin and was wearing his Swedish Rally bobble
hat, from the previous weekend’s WRC event.
David Sutton looked up and cheerfully quipped:
“watch out, here comes Scoop” as David Bryant
introduced me to Hannu. I’d previously only seen
Mikkola in competition, behind the wheel, and was
expecting a man as aggressive as the car he was
driving, but not a bit of it. Hannu shook my hand
and remarked: “two scoops for the price of one,
eh?” and walked off to the motorhome to collect his
things. David Bryant looked at me and winked: “well,
you’re vanilla and I’m chocolate. Let’s go and get
something to eat.”

Mikkola sweeps to victory in
the 1986 National Breakdown

Tyres, tyres, everywhere...
1985 Welsh Rally

he kindly took me under his wing and from there I
started shadowing him on a few rounds of the British
Championship, learning my trade, watching him
work and shooting my own stuff on an Olympus OM1
SLR with just a couple of lenses.
I was studying photography at art college, and
in my final year had run out of money. I wrote off
to several car manufacturers asking them for help
with sponsorship but only Audi’s Laura Warren
replied. Thanks to David, and his sway with the
PR department at VAG, the company funded my
professional year as a photographer, allowing me to
shoot their cars and build up my portfolio.
A by-product of that was a unique access to some
behind the scenes moments of a rally team that had
won everything, and were riding on the crest of a
wave. But for how much longer could it all go on?

A Snowy Start
All I had with me were my wellies and a pair of
trainers. An overnight bag and my camera sat in
the seat next to me as I travelled from Edinburgh to

Bradford on the National Express coach. It was 1986
and I was 18, on my way to the start of the British
Open Rally Championship to shoot the National
Breakdown Rally.
Hannu Mikkola had, just a few months earlier,
completed a tortured season with Audi, where the
Sport quattro S1 had recorded only one win, in Italy,
in the hands of team-mate Walter Röhrl. Despite
being one of the more powerful machines, the
Audi was showing its age as mid-engined machines
from Lancia and Peugeot started to show the way
forward just five short years after the quattro had
burst onto the scene.
Hannu was in a bullish mood when I first met
him. He knew he had a good chance to win the
National Breakdown in the icy conditions, but was
aware of the young David Llewellin snapping at his
heels in the Metro 6R4. The Welshman was on his
way up in the sport, having impressed with a series
of measured drives in the British Championship
the previous year and as I arrived at the Audi
team’s hotel Mikkola was outside in 44WMN, the

Servicing in the snow

Lasse Lampi in a privately
entered quattro A1 on the
1983 RAC Rally`

M

y first taste of Wales came courtesy of a Primus
gas stove and a can of rice pudding.
It was 1987 and David and myself were on the
Fram Filters Welsh rally, the third round of the Shell
Oils British Rally Championship. We had to shoot
two entries from VAG that year, plus one from
Finland – Sebastian Lindholm – and Per Eklund in
his Clarion-sponsored Audi from Sweden. Our usual
drivers, David Llewellin and Phil Short in the Audi
Coupe quattro and Simon Davidson and Nicky
Grist in the Golf GTI 16V, weren’t faring all that well

in the championship leaderboard and were up
against some strong competition. All eyes were
on Lindholm as he put up a strong fight against his
fellow countryman Pentti Airikkala who was enjoying
something of a renaissance in his underpowered but
reliable Vauxhall Astra. Jimmy McRae was up there
with his Ford Sierra Cosworth while Russell Brookes,
that stalwart of the British Rally Championship,
gamely fought on with the by now ageing Open
Manta 400.
David used a variety of cars to follow the rallies

– basically whatever was available from the VAG
press pool at that time. On this rally, a Helios Blue
Golf GTI 16V was the car of the day, and at 5am
with the sun slowly rising over the bonnet we parked
up at the stage start and brewed up.
Rice pudding had become a bit of a joke
between me and David, and the rest of the team
often use to joke about stocking up with spare cans
whenever we turned up to the motorhome. I found
all very amusing, and between the pair of us we
became quite adept at ‘pudding stops’ en route...

Scottish testing with the 200
quattro, still in its HB/Audi Sport
livery, in 1987

The 200 quattro was a
lumbersome beast, and poor
old David Llewellin never
enjoyed his time with it

R

allying with the Audi Sport UK team was never
dull. As the young assistant I was never afforded
the luxury of a room of my own in the many hotels
we’d stay at, but I didn’t mind. Most times I’d share
a room with David and we’d discuss all sorts of
things in the evening - the day’s stages, the shot that
got away, Eric Clapton and blues music, the best
Ordnance Survey maps and so on. I loved every
second.
Being the smallest cog in what was then the largest
team in the British Open Rally Championship bar

Rothmans Opel, I tackled every job given to me with
teenage enthusiasm, often rewarded with a bacon
sandwich from Pam and Georgie in the motorhome
if they needed something fetching or water bottles
refilling. I would be tasked with sorting the exposed
films out, labelling the canisters and replenishing the
bag with new stock removed from their cardboard
boxes. I’d go in search of screenwash when the car
was parked up at service halts, or on one case I had
to go get some Fishermen’s Friends for Stig Blomqvist.
The infamous Audi ‘barge’ was our satellite base

on event, or rather its roof was, accessed by a
ladder running up the back. As drivers sat inside
with the management we’d be ‘upstairs’ (as David
Sutton often put it) shooting the crowds as they
craned closer to the quattros while Norman Gault,
John O’Connor and the rest of the mechanics
serviced them. Crowds back in those days were
huge (remember this was long before the Internet
and satellite telly had stolen the coverage) and
we’d often have to push and shove our way through
the army of fans to get shots of the cars. Invariably,

our lofty perch was the preferred viewpoint – and
the pictures always looked better too as they
showed the crowd sizes and general excitement.
Well, most of the time. I tried a slow shutter speed
image once with the camera fixed on a tripod.
Carefully I focused, got the composition spot on and
was mid-way through a five second exposure when
the whole motorhome started to shake about – Arne
Hertz had a sneezing fit and ruined my picture!
I remember when the first autofocus camera
arrived. It was a Nikon F801 and we were highly

That’s me! At age 11 I was
already addicted, trudging
through the forests on the 1981
RAC Rally

slow exposures when I wasn’t shovelling film through
the Nikons.
That was one of the things I remember most
about my rallying days – the landscape. It’s where
I first developed my love of travel, moving about
from place to place. Always pressured for time,
the constant battle against the clock had its
own strange attraction. “You never get a second
chance” was a phrase that David would constantly
use, and it stuck in my head – I still remember it
today when I’m shooting my own work.
After each rally we would return to Milton Keynes
and process film - and then the graft of churning
out loads of prints for press releases would start. The
VAG Studio had a very well-equipped darkroom and
in there I was to spend many happy hours getting
my fingers wet devving film and invariably stinking
of bleach fix. I used to emerge, blinking like a Mole
The Scottish Rally in 1984 saw
Hannu MIkkola sweep to
victory with Phil Short co-driving

sceptical about its performance – so much so that
we’d turn the AF off and focus manually. We used
a pair of them mounted on a homemade metal
brace side-by-side with one body shooting colour
transparency (always Kodak Ektachrome) and
the other loaded with Ilford XP1 and latterly Kodak
T-Max. The black and white film could be processed
in the same chemistry as all the colour neg stuff
we’d shoot back in Milton Keynes and was therefore
far more economical to use, as it required no special
chemistry.
It was the standard lash up back in those days,
and all the photographers had a pair of cameras
mounted in similar fashion. I remember seeing Hugh
Bishop, a large man with a reputation for fantastic
quality images, and realized the reason why his shots
were always so much better – he had the ubiquitous
two-camera set up, sure, but while one body was a
35mm SLR (a Pentax LX), the other was a Pentax 67,
a huge medium-format SLR which shot 6x7cm roll
film (twice the size of a 35mm slide). Twice the film
size, twice the quality. Mind you, it weighed a ton!

The other photographers we’d work with were
often comparing cameras and discussed image
quality – as well as the colour of Michele Mouton’s
underwear... Secret battles were forever being
waged to get the best angle, and some guys took it
to extremes. Les Kolczak, a man who now runs one
of the bigger rallying photo agencies in the UK, used
to take a pair of aluminum stepladders with him to
get extra height and was always the butt of many a
gentle joke. And then Reinhard Klein came over to
cover the 1983 RAC Rally and blew everyone out of
the water with his unique vision.

Personal passions
David used to get frustrated with this, as he was
(and still is!) a highly accomplished landscape
photographer but never had much time to shoot
more personal images when working for Audi.
He had to remain true to the corporate brief and
record images of the quattro in suitable glory poses.
The arty stuff was something I was left to get on with
– and I enjoyed playing about with flashguns and

surfacing from beneath the lawn, to be greeted by
Chris, the studio secretary and fed with chocolate
biscuits – hidden in the bottom drawer of a filing
cabinet away from the hungry photographers.

Changing a punctured wheel
in Wales, courtey of David
Sutton’s rally mechanics!

Mikkola on the Circuit of
Ireland in 1986

surfacing from beneath the lawn, to be greeted by
Chris, the studio secretary and fed with chocolate
biscuits – hidden in the bottom drawer of a filing
cabinet away from the hungry photographers.
A Beseler enlarger was fitted with a photographic
paper drum on the baseboard, which enabled
batches of the same image to be printed. This was
all done via an electronic feed and a clockwork
timer. We’re talking hundreds of images here, each
captioned with a Letraset imprint on the bottom
detailing event, car, driver/co-driver and date (a

separate exposure, equally complicated, frequently
cocked up by yours truly). The Beseler was a law
unto itself and paper jams, clock malfunctions (often
referred to as a ‘clock-ups’) and other annoying
niggles were to quickly mark it out as a right pain
in the ass to use. Only David managed to work it
successfully, but even then it would occasionally
bite him – most notably when the heavy enlarger
head slipped from the column and crushed his
fingers when he was delicately inserting a precious
negative.

Two rounds of the British Open Championship were
to see Bryant’s badly bandaged digits embrace his
Nikons “all because of that bastard enlarger!”

Home and away
When not shooting rally cars my work with VAG often
extended to shooting its range of road vehicles. This
was loads of fun, and David and myself were never
happier when out and about shooting. Helpfully, my
parents lived in the beautiful Scottish Borders, very
close to Elibank forest near Peebles where the Audi

team used to go testing so we would sometimes
travel north, kip over at my folks, and take a quattro
variant of some kind into the forests for some suitably
rugged shots (I remember us once getting a 90
quattro stuck in a slate quarry). My father worked
for the Forestry Commission and had one of the very
special keys that would open any padlocked gate
in the UK forests. A spare one eventually made its
way into David’s Billingham camera bag…
There were times in Milton Keynes when studio
photography was in demand, never more so than

Michele Mouton came to
Britain regularly and is seen
here on the 1985 Manx driving
the ferocious Sport quattro S1

those magic moments where I had to pinch myself.
As a lowly student I pinched myself quite a lot back
in those days…
Lucy had a list, as all marketing people do, and
busied herself sorting out the cars while David and
I drove around the huge expanse of the factory
site in an unregistered GTI. It had only come off the
production line the day before – I often wonder
what happened to that car and what its eventual
owners would have thought if they knew that it
doubled up as on-site transport for two English
photographers…

Changing of the guard
As the rallying rules changed in 1986 with the
banning of the Group B cars, so Audi Sport faced a
dilemma. For six years the UK team had ridden rather
a large wave, winning the 1983 British Open Rally

when the Volkswagen Corrado was first launched.
The very first car came over from Wolfsburg for
evaluative testing on UK roads and I was one of the
first people to see it. Left hand drive, silver, the G60
engine, it was such a beauty and photographed
very well from all angles. Bearing in mind that the
rather angular Scirocco was still ‘on the books’ this
new upstart proved an instant hit in the car park.
Dealings with the VW ‘mothership’ (our tonguein-cheek reference to the Wolfsburg factory) was a
regular thing, and I was lucky to go to the factory
with David to help shoot the Mk2 Golf GTI when
it was relaunched in 1988 with doors (minus the A
pillars). We needed press shots and because there
was a delay in getting right-hand-drive models over
to the UK we took a set of back-to-front number
plates and shot the car in the grounds of the factory,
taking great care to avoid backgrounds that had
German signs in them. Once we got the shots, all
we’d do was flip the negatives and – voila! – a right
hand drive car with UK numberplates. Genius.
We drove over in an Audi 100 quattro

accompanied by Lucy Cooper from VAG’s
marketing department and me in the back with
ladders, buckets, camera bags and suitcases. The
rain lashed down on us from Calais all the way down
to Aachen where we stopped for something to eat.
At one point the Audi aquaplaned on the Autobahn
but its legendary 4WD system kept us in a straight
line, although the colour did drain from his face
somewhat!
Arriving in Wolfsburg for the first time was very
memorable for me. I’d obviously read a lot about
the factory and seen the pictures of Beetles
gathered outside back in the 1930s, but to be
actually there was very special indeed. It was dark
when we finally found the hotel and dominating the
skyline was a huge VW roundel fixed to one of the
factory chimneys, all lit up and shining its message
out to the world. From my hotel room I took pictures
of it with the twinkling lights of Hanover further to
the West, in the background. Kraftwerk was playing
from the TV in the corner. I swear you couldn’t have
made it more Germanic if you tried. It was one of

Championship with Stig Blomqvist plus the factory
scooping up two world titles in ’82 with Hannu
Mikkola and again in ’84 with Stig. It seemed nothing
could get in the way of the mighty quattros but Audi
were soon to find themselves out in the cold with no
competitive car to take on the far nimbler Group A
machines.
David Llewellin was signed up and, ably coached
by Phil Short, the pair tackled the 1987 season
together with mixed results.
Our lives as photographers had changed too, with
not only the Audis to shoot but also the Volkswagen
Motorsport team to produce press pictures for as
well. This made life even more hectic – and all the
more exciting for it. We supported David and Phil
in the Audi camp, but also privateer Sebastian
Lindholm (cousin of Marcus Gronholm) and for
Volkswagen Simon Davison (co-driven by a then